Deciphering the code

Auroville-based Pierre Legrand takes Kishore Singh on a grand tour of his studio.

You have to be a legend of sorts when the taxiwallah knows how to get you there without once asking for the address. In Pierre Legrand’s case, that’s hardly surprising though, since he came to Auroville a year before the community was set up in 1968. He was 26 years then, an engineer, who simply returned and made Auroville his home.

It’s an impressive home with trees shading the path that leads to a house that sweeps up in avant-garde mode, all exposed concrete and glass and a quality of light that seems almost unique to Auroville. And here Legrand, 67 this year, is in his element, his studio the ground floor expanse where light filters through screens and artworks so it’s difficult to tell the architecture apart from the art.

If Legrand is surprisingly little known in the north, it’s because of a Gallic stubbornness to do the rounds of galleries, to pay obeisance before collectors and curators. There’s a hint of that obstinacy in his stance, in the way his chin juts out, even in his self-assurance. “I told you you’d be overwhelmed,” he tells me when, a day after he’d struggled to explain his works — “they’re something between paintings and sculpture”, he’d attempted — he’d extended an invitation to his studio.

It is indeed difficult to explain exactly his works, but Legrand’s explanation too is spot on. For Legrand, whose works have ended up in homes in Chennai and in collections in France, seems to enjoy creating tactile art. For most part, these seem to consist of jute or cotton or sometimes plastic filaments that have been strung with jute or nylon, knotted, pierced, fretted, cut or embossed, suspended from a frame, or held up against a source of light, from which the most fascinating patterns emerge.

Once, that work was leached of all colour, when he began it was dull with earth colours, but in recent years the palette has been joyous, a bewildering array of primary hues, bold, abstract but in amazing empathy, a realisation that in the right hands they can co-exist as if they were meant to be.

In another sense, these are like installations that combine craft —Legrand uses other Aurovilians to create the meshed strings that constitute his canvases — with his sense of art. In another century, he might even have been Madame Defarge for the pierced motifs on his screens, he points out, are actually letters, coded to write out messages, or names. In the mosaic of their patterns, shapes appear and disappear, colours blot or explode.

Though he has exhibited in Europe and in Chennai, Legrand’s low profile in India is at least partly to do with his Auroville persona: he seems to enjoy his art away from the pressures of commerce. “I paint in the mornings,” he says, rising early to catch the filtered dawn in the stilt-supported ground floor studio where cats chase across his piles of “canvas”. Like them at play, he seems to enjoy the peek-a-boo of light and shadows that his “paintings” create.

In the experimental construct he brings to his work, a playfulness is apparent, even in the steel sculptures he fathoms in the shape of the globe, or a ball, the dimensions of the universe caged in a space that exists both inside and outside. He smiles wryly, conscious of the humour he has deliberately crafted even as you try and absorb the metaphor of his artistic sensibility. “I like it,” he says, “I knew you’d like it too.” That about sums it up.